A list

Presents information briefly and memorably

Assembles material that belongs together

Groups items that contribute to an understanding of something greater

What punctuation is required in a list? Should the list be part of a sentence? Should the items be numbered? Here are some practical guidelines to help you get consistency when you create a list. Continue Reading…

At FastProof we proofread lots of university papers written by students from overseas. They manage to study in an unfamiliar language, and we do our best to improve their grammar without influencing their content.

The topic is always interesting even if unfamiliar. In the last year proofreading has kept me well informed about housing in Mongolia, dairy farming in Brazil, the colonisation of Tonga, the construction of microwave conduits and the role of design in the restoration of Iraq.

One develops a relish for quickly absorbing new topics. Regrettably, most of the information the proofreader absorbs leaks out almost as fast as it went in. Or maybe that’s useful, because I don’t need to retain all that information for the proofreading.

In dealing with the “foreign” use of English, one encounters all kinds of grammatical constructions — unconventional, plain wrong or full-on wacky. English can be infinitely and divertingly mangled, and we can find ourselves smiling at the expressions they concoct.

Then I set to work dismantling the curious concoction. I constructed this communicative contrivance to depict and describe the problem of difficult passages. It seems apt:

We hope it makes proofreading accessible to heaps of Kiwis so we can help them publish their documents with confidence. To keep in touch with our promotions and activities, go to facebook, search for FastProof and ‘like’ us.

NOTE: Choose the co.nz. version, not .org (which is in Ohio).

To celebrate our facebook launch, we’ve cut our prices in half. All proofreading orders are half-price — but only for the next two weeks! This is an unrepeatable promotion, so get a move on!!

What exactly is proofreading?

Everyone’s different, and their documents are different. It’s hard to make rules for them all, so we’re flexible.

FastProof is designed to be fast, inexpensive and good quality. To fulfil the promise of bringing proofreading to everyone, we correct only spelling, punctuation and basic grammar. Correcting basic grammar means fixing missing words, an incorrect plural, replacing “than” with “then” — miscellaneous things like that. We love it.

So FastProof corrects mistakes but doesn’t try to “improve” your writing — it doesn’t try to find a better word than the one you’ve used.

We take the view that your writing is perfect, but there could be unintentional flaws (as anyone might leave). We spot and correct such flaws quickly, so the price stays down. Lingering over what you’ve said to consider how one might say it better takes longer, so we don’t do that. Unless you ask us to, then we give it to WordShine.

If the author is a native English speaker, FastProof is probably all you need to polish the writing.

The letter “s” is used with an apostrophe to indicate possession — as in “my aunt’s pen.” The usage goes back over 1500 years, around 450 AD, to Old English, language of the Anglo-Saxons. The language had deep roots in Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit which produced a complex system of noun declensions and verb conjugations, most of which have gone now, leaving mere remnants (like this curiosity of possessiveness).

How did the genitive case work? Important nouns were given the ending “es” to indicate the genitive — the possessive case — like “the cloud’s velocity.” As time went by more and more nouns were treated like this, so by the Middle English period (1000–1400) this method of indicating the possessive applied to all nouns. But by then the letter “e” in the “es” was no longer pronounced and was redundant.

So about the middle of the 1500’s English printers began to omit a silent “e” and replace it with an apostrophe, which was hitherto a French practice. Hence “my auntes pen” became “my aunt’s pen” and remains like that today.

The practice is way behind us, so “the cates pyjamas” has become “the cat’s pyjamas”. We no longer recognise our ancestores ways!

Troubled by typos? Maddened by misspellings? My best advice for you is this: don’t make mistakes.

If you take this advice, you won’t need spell checkers (which leave mistakes because they have no brain), editors (who have brains but need plenty of money) or Aunt Maisy (who’s quite skilled but often takes a nap) to check over your writing.

They won’t be needed because your writing will be perfect.

If, for some reason, you cannot heed my thoughtful counsel of perfection, send your writing to FastProof for the modern, fast and easy way to remove mistakes.

Duplicate words

It’s easy to type little words twice and, if they end up in the sneakily right place in a paragraph, it’s hard to spot the duplication. Watch out for words like “the”,”of”, “and”, “air”, “salt”, “back”, “butt” and “but” hiding copies of themselves where you least expect them. Even longer words can get into stealth mode – words such as “wheelbarrow”, “submarine” and “international” – although not often.

Misspelling

The launch of FastProof on 20 February was followed behind the scenes by frenetic activity as we hit the phones to sign up businesses for our newsletter.

Preliminary figures show an astounding uptake above 90 percent. We’re very excited. Many businesses have been trying without success to find a proofreader, and FastProof finally gives them an easy solution. Time will tell – when these subscriptions get converted into sales.

Big companies have proofreaders on their staff, but small to medium companies can’t afford it. Individuals don’t use a proofreader! You and I only need a proofreader about every five or ten years to check our cv, but who knows how to get one or how much to pay them?